1 May
2016
1 May
'16
10:24 p.m.
On 5/1/16 04:10, Erik Baigar wrote:
PTE ::= Page Table Entry.
"Eagle" was DG's name for the MV architecture; ROLM's "Hawk"
was a play
on "Eagle" ;)
IIRC we caught the problem early enough that they were able to come up
with a hardware invalidation that did materially what the MV's did and
thus we didn't end up paying a terrible performance penalty on context
switching.
sorry, but there emerged more questions from my side
;-)
It's a trip down memory lane ;)
On Fri, 29 Apr 2016, Christian Kennedy wrote:
Advanced Real Time System. Memory resident with hard latency limits for
servicing interrupts; it had nothing to do with the Ada compiler.
Hawk, but not the odd S/140 and MV/8000 punches)
and software (ARTS,
ARTS/32) were ROLM designs.
I only know ARTS from ads being sold on eBay - this is some
form od Ada development environment (or a complete OS?)? The
acronym probably means something like "Ada Real Time System" (?).
Was this a cross compiler tool or did it run natively on the
hardware? As there is a /32 variant, do you think a variant
for the 16 bit machines like 16xx or MSE14 did survive some-
where?
ARTS/32 was for Eagle architecture machines and actually made use of the
rings :P. Prior to the Hawk there was a punch (basically a
militarization of DG's prints) of the MV/8000 of which something like
three were sold; it was about the size of a large modern refrigerator
and was sufficiently massive that it had large lifting rings on the top
of the cabinet; while sometime someone would fire up the one that lurked
in the hardware lab, 99.999% of ARTS/32 (and all of the Marvin)
development took place on commercial DG hardware -- MV/8000s for
ARTS/32, MV/10000s for Marvin (with MV/4000s used as target machines).
I have no idea if any of the software survived anywhere :(
It's funny that you mention the MSE14; it was the other punch done by
ROLM, basically a S140 stuffed into a 1/2 ATR chassis. IIRC it had a
somewhat painful gestation, because mapping the 15x15" S/140 processor
onto multiple smaller cards created interesting timing problems.
The ADA compiler was developed in partnership with Rational; as part of
that deal ROLM was supposed to look at creating a militarized version of
the R1000. The R1000 was freaking huge -- much taller than a MV/8000,
to the point that getting it into the machine room was a bit of a
challenge -- and it turned out it was markedly slower executing Ada code
than a MV/8000 running code produced by the ROLM compiler, so in the end
that project went more or less nowhere.
Steve Wallach had incorporated into the PTE
format for the Eagle in
order to turn memory references into I/O requests that would be
transparently resolved in the physical memory of another machine.
Although I do not recognize the "PTE format", I guess the Eagle
project is related to a widely sold US made aircraft, right? This
one carried at least one Hawk/32 ;-)
Some of the Rolm stuff I have got is from the company which serviced
the equipment of the ATTAS aircraft...
http://www.dlr.de/dlr/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10644#gallery/1751
http://www.dlr.de/dlr/Portaldata/1/Resources/documents/ATTAS_Handout_2001.p…
Huh. Interesting :)
deal from each
other ("Yes, I know that the PATU instruction only occurs
twice in the body of AOS/VS, but it's executed on every context switch
and as such it's probably not a really good idea to implement it by
having the microcode scrub each entry in the TLB").
I guess you have not been happy with context switching and how
the Rolm microcode implemented it. Unfortunately, there is nothing
on the internet related to the instruction set of the Hawk/32
family but the hardware contained lot of big custom chips and
therefor I guess it was far more powerful and complex than
e.g. the Eclipse or earlier machines.
It's instruction set is identical to the MV/8000, but there's some
differences in how it treats "undefined" results and "undefined"
bitfields in a handful of instructions, enough to require tweaking the
diagnostics.
--
Christian Kennedy, Ph.D.
chris at mainecoon.com AF6AP | DB00000692 | PG00029419
http://www.mainecoon.com PGP KeyID 108DAB97
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"Mr. McKittrick, after careful consideration?"